Coffee & Flowers: Talkin’ Talk

There was this old D’Sound song that I was oh-so-fond of. It went a little bit like talkin’ talk is not just talk, getting’ there is half the walk or something. Hah. Let’s pretend I don’t remember. Today, I had a really good lunch break. I was able to sit around by myself for about fifteen minutes and was able to contemplate the following things: what is it about the pantry that is so comforting? What is it about reading that makes you feel okay? And moreover, why is it that there are so many aspects of a person’s life that run parallel to each other? Why is my office self different from my “writing” self? Or different from my family self? My student self? My music self? My girly self? My friend Raine said something interesting to me a few months ago: where have I hiding all my friends? She said that it was so curious that all the time she’s known me (around six years), she only met a huge lot of my friends this year. It was like I lived in a parallel world. It isn’t on purpose though, these parallel lives or parallel type of scenarios. Why do I feel like these things coming together is so odd? Why do I feel odd for them not coming together? Furthermore, is fiction the attempt at putting all these things together? Is it possible? Moreover, does it matter? Ah, all the pretentious kind of shit that I thumb through—which is just fine, I guess. All fiction is a kind of pretension anyway. Like all good literature or art, I guess what matters is that it’s believable.

And then some of my office mates decided to go on their lunch breaks as well and suddenly, there was a whole lot of talkin’ to be done. That was really nice. To put things in context: it isn’t often that I get to have lunch with other people because a) our office is a small but busy one and b) our lunch times are adjustable, according to our shifts and positions so that the office is never empty. Not that I mind this, either. I like productivity. It’s comforting to hear the clacking of keys. Today was one of those rare days when I got to spend my break actually talking to people. It’s very interesting, the number of things you can learn from people around you—or about the people around you.

There was talk about rice cookers: what you can make in them (noodles, soup, fried chicken) and how you can place them on the floor near the socket and accidentally step on them. There was talk about coffee and how cheap beans are and then the surreptitious look of disdain at the instant coffee maker. Someone said something about melons and how good they are with milk. Someone bit into preserved ham. I cut into my chicken nuggets. Someone mentions vegetables and someone else heads back to their desk.

I forgot my coffee at home today—that’s a first and possibly my karma for both drinking too much of it and trying to cut down on it rapidly. I’m still on the fence about whether or not karma operates so directly. I get the feeling that the minute that karma becomes reasonable or logical, I will no longer believe in it. I wonder if I believe in it. I wonder about logic, in general. I am an illogical person, underneath all the science-ing of this, or science-ing of that—I think that this is where my desire to outline or to enumerate or to force cohesion into things comes from: the actual lack of the belief that it can be achieved. And so I am superstitious: I do believe that somehow, not having the coffee may propel something bad to happen.

And nothing bad happened. I had dinner with my friend Trizha, I met my sister’s friend/teacher from her Creative Writing class. I talked a lot. And now I’m ready for bed. And maybe things will be okay, yes?